13 private art museums with incredible galleries

Our creative world-view is being challenged by a new breed of empire-building patron, whose incredible galleries are appearing in some very unusual locations, finds Jonathan Bastable

Many of the world’s great cities have acquired a spectacular new attraction – or two or three – since you were last there. Privately owned museums are popping up on every continent like bluebells in spring; there are now well over 300 in the world. Around 200 of these were founded after the millennium and 60 or so in the past ﬁve years. They are a diverse and adaptable species in the cultural safari park, which can be more daring than a state-run institution because they are unconstrained by committees of trustees or by the overriding urge to please. Or by the need to present the national patrimony in the best possible light, or by fear of bad press, or even – in some cases – by any limit on budgets. These freedoms mean that private museums tend to be idiosyncratic and look to young artists rather than dead ones, so they ﬁll a gap that fustier, backward-looking state museums rarely can. And they encourage a global conversation by championing the present over the past, by standing for what is avant-garde and international as opposed to what is traditional and domestic.

1. James Turrell MuseumOne of the world’s most memorable private museums is devoted to a single artist, the American experimentalist James Turrell. His works are immersive rooms ﬁlled with mesmeric and disorienting installations made of coloured light. As such, they require specially designed and constructed spaces. The Swiss collector Donald Hess built the James Turrell Museum (call for details; 0054-3868-49 4200, bodegacolome.com/museo) to the artist’s speciﬁcation at Colomé, his estate in the north-west of Argentina. The clear and constant light here is perfect for Turrell’s work. I drove there along twisted dusty tracks, through valley after valley. At every turn, the car’s engine startled ﬂocks of barranqueros – little blue-green birds that shimmer like dragonﬂies. The journey to the Turrell museum is arduous, a test of any art lover’s mettle. It is also a wonderful preparation for Turrell’s luminous, numinous works. I can think of no other museum that plays harder to get, but Turrell himself has remarked that it is only right that visitors have to work to see his creations, since he has to work to make them. “This is exactly the type of place I like,” he said at the museum’s opening, “secluded, away from the tourist routes of the art world.” The irony is that Turrell’s museum has had the effect of putting Colomé on the art map, at least for the most intrepid visitors.

JAMES TURRELL MUSEUM

2. The Museum of Old and New ArtThe Museum of Old and New Art (tickets from AED 92; 0061-3-6277 9900, mona.net.au) in Hobart, Tasmania, is another distant outpost on the modern-art trail. MONA has turned Tassie on its head by making this far-flung town a cool place. And it has shifted the art world’s centre of gravity toward the southern hemisphere: if you are interested in the conceptual art of the Nineties and the millennial decade, you have to check out this astonishing place. Nothing in this windowless, subterranean museum is arranged by theme or epoch – the Egyptian sarcophagi jostle for space with video installations, and classical sculptures in basalt and marble sit alongside Damien Hirst spin paintings. Much of the art is challenging, even disturbing, and there are numerous pieces that have been banned elsewhere for being pornographic or blasphemous. Controversy is central; one of the things that makes it so sensational.

MONA is a great example of the Bilbao effect (a phrase coined when the Guggenheim put the Spanish city on the map), but accidental, unbidden. Owner David Walsh happily declares that he doesn’t care about the museum’s implications for the travel industry. He may not, but the art hotels on the Victorian wharf are rammed with visitors who – once they get this far – are sometimes surprised to ﬁnd that Tasmania has also become a great foodie destination, perhaps in part to serve the discerning tastes of MONA’s fans. The museum itself has a terriﬁc restaurant, The Source, but there are many others on the island. My favourite is Stillwater in Launceston: it’s worth heading to the north end of Tasmania just for the Flinders saltgrass lamb rump.

"THE TOMB OF A KAMIKAZE" AT MONA

3. Leeum, Samsung Museum of ArtIn other parts of the world, private museums have been built where there is already strong footfall. Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art (tickets from AED 35; 0082-2-2014 6901, leeum.samsungfoundation.org) is one of 45 privately funded museums in South Korea. It’s actually two museums in one. The ﬁrst, designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta, showcases only Korean art; the second, by French designer Jean Nouvel, is intended to allow “works of art by both Korean and foreign artists to come together in harmony”. Leeum is the brainchild of resigned director Hong Ra-Hee, the wife of Samsung chairman Lee Kun-Hee, South Korea’s wealthiest individual. Many of the works in the Leeum come from their collection of 15,000 contemporary pieces.

4. Arario Museum and GalleryA number of the private museums in South Korea are run by corporations but the recent upsurge is largely the work of one man, Kim Chang-Il. Chairman of the Arario group of companies, he has been collecting art since the Seventies and owns nearly 4,000 modern works, a selection of which can be seen at the remodelled Space building (tickets from AED 35; 0082-2-736 5700, arariomuseum.org), a much-loved glassy piece of modernism in central Seoul, or at one of the four museums that Kim has opened on Jeju Island, where he goes on holidays; or at the satellite Arario Gallery (tickets from AED 10; 0082-41-551 5100, arariogallery.com) in Cheonan, his hometown. He has also stationed a museum in Shanghai. That city is a logical home, because China’s cultural capital is presently the locus of a kind of museological arms race: new venues are opening at a phenomenal rate, and each one is looking to outgun the next.

5. The Long MuseumChina’s busiest collectors are husband and wife Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, who made their fortune in stocks and pharmaceuticals and have poured that cash into buying art. Five years ago they opened the Long Museum (call for details; 0086-21-6877 8787, thelongmuseum.org) in Shanghai’s Pudong district, where skyscrapers and ﬁnance houses jostle for space. One ﬂoor of the brutalist ediﬁce contains contemporary art, a second is ﬁlled with 20th-century classics of the Cultural Revolution and a third is dedicated to Chinese antiquities. Wang and Liu have since opened a second Long Museum (0086-21-6422 7636) in Shanghai’s West Bund, a crane-ﬁlled stretch of waterfront that was already on the way up before the galleries moved in. There’s another on the banks of the Yangtze in Chongqing (0086-23-6796 1268) and a fourth under construction in Wuhan – the start and end point of river cruises to see the Three Gorges.

THE LONG MUSEUM

6. Yuz MuseumTwenty minutes’ walk from the second Long Museum is Yuz Museum, Shanghai (tickets from AED 87; 0086-21-6426 1901, yuzmshanghai.org), brainchild of Chinese-Indonesian collector and philanthropist Budi Tek. He, too, is a serial museum-maker. The original Yuz Museum was in Jakarta; the newer site, in a converted aircraft hangar on the Huangpu River, is perfectly suited to the large-scale works that Budi Tek favours.

YUZ MUSEUM

7. Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art AfricaPrivate museums are often about architecture as well as art. Some prospective owners take the opportunity to give new life to a redundant landmark. In Cape Town, Thomas Heatherwick’s studio has just transformed the historic Grain Silo complex in the V&A Waterfront into the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (tickets from AED 56; 0027-87-350 4777, zeitzmocaa.museum). When it opened last autumn, it became the largest museum in Africa in more than a century, featuring a sculptural interior where the cylinders of the silos have been carved out to make a grand vestibule resembling giant organ pipes. And it exists strictly in the present tense: none of its works will predate 2000.

ZEITZ MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART AFRICA

8. The BroadOther owners build something so spectacular that the ediﬁce itself becomes as much of a draw as its contents. The Broad (free entry; 001-213-232 6200, thebroad.org) in Los Angeles is a strange amalgam of ﬁbreglass and concrete, a work of art in its own right. The museum houses the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. It is another one of the museums intended to regenerate a rundown area through its own benevolent presence. The collection is strong on the American masters: Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons and Roy Lichtenstein.

9. Elgiz MuseumThe Elgiz Museum (free entry; 0090-212-290 2525, elgizmuseum.org) in Istanbul, meanwhile, became Turkey’s ﬁrst public venue for contemporary art when it opened in Maslak in 2001, occupying what was once a Porsche showroom. Skyscrapers look down on the museum’s rooftop sculpture park like silent critics, and many of these tall buildings were designed by the museum’s owner, Can Elgiz: he has, in an entirely literal way, shaped the corner of the city where his collection is located.

10. Rubell Family CollectionThe Rubell Family Collection (tickets from AED 37; 001-305-573 6090, rfc.museum) in Miami ﬁlls a former lock-up run by the US Drug Enforcement Agency. When I visited, I was shown the strong rooms that once held racks of conﬁscated arms and illicit substances. The museum is in Wynwood, halfway between Miami International Airport and South Beach. A decade ago, this was a rough area, all warehouses and factories. But the museum attracted other galleries – along with boutiques, restaurants and other bits of life-afﬁrming infrastructure. Now, as if its job in Wynwood were done, the Rubells’ museum is moving. Its new home will be in Miami’s Allapattah district. Look out for that area’s turnaround.

"STORM TIME APPROXIMATION" AT RUBELL

11. SarvisaloMonumental sculptures, outdoor installations and land art are an important element in the contemporary scene, which may help explain the trend for island art complexes: they make for naturally circumscribed spaces in which to display en plein air. Jeju in South Korea is one such spot; another is Sarvisalo (zabludowiczcollection.com/visit/sarvisalo), a Finnish islet and the setting for the al fresco portion of the collection of Anita and Poju Zabludowicz (its primary home is a converted church in North London). Sarvisalo functions as an “art colony”, a peaceful retreat where invited artists can devote themselves to the monastic business of making beautiful objects. The outworkings of these residencies are then installed amid the meadows and silver birches. Public access is restricted to open days but if you can get there, you’re sure to see wonderful things.

12. GES-2It is Moscow, though, that looks like the art hotspot for years to come. Leonid Mikhelson, Russia’s richest man, has acquired a pre-revolutionary power station in the city centre and is turning it into the home of his private collection. GES-2 (rpbw.com/project/ges-2), as it is known for now, will be restored and converted by Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Creativity hangs in the air here. Last time I was in Moscow, I spent a happy morning exploring the galleries that have been shoehorned into old goods yards and former factory ﬂoors. Mikhelson’s new museum will extend and cement this new art quarter, which is a short stroll from the Kremlin walls.

13. Garage Museum of Contemporary ArtsAlready in Moscow is Garage Museum of Contemporary Arts (tickets from AED 33; 007-495-645 0520, garagemca.org), the contemporary-arts centre set up by Dasha Zhukova, partner of Roman Abramovich. The works were ﬁrst housed in a Twenties bus depot – hence the name – but Zhukova has moved them to an enormous Soviet-era concrete brick of a restaurant in Gorky Park, having ﬁrst had the building re-imagined by Rem Koolhaas. With Garage as a centrepiece, Gorky Park has been reborn. It has a man-made beach, universal Wi-Fi and undoubtedly the most important contemporary art hub east of Berlin. The biggest new opening in the near future will be in Paris. This year, Christie’s owner François Pinault is installing his vast collection at the Bourse de Commerce, close to Les Halles. It will be part of a plan to give “a new beating heart” to this corner of the city, according to Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo. She should be optimistic; there is an overlap between the pastime of looking at art and the business of engaged, intelligent travel. The people who do these things are usually one and the same.